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Limited ATI support?

You can't use ATI cards in BSD? Well, only HD 4xxx cards work and only using the open source driver? So, if you bought an Evergreen or NI card, you can't use it at all? CLAP, CLAP... Way to go ATI/AMD! Great support. How are things with Windows these days?

Okay, it's limited to the same open source code, 'sounds like, that is in Linux.

So, whatever the state of things are for Evergreen...

FreeBSD systems have the same open-source support for Radeon hardware as Linux, including 2D and 3D acceleration for Radeon R100, R200, and R300-series chipsets. The R300 support, as with Linux, remained experimental due to being reverse-engineered from ATI's proprietary drivers, but with the release of official documentation by AMD (following its buyout of ATI), all Radeon families up to R700 have at least 2D support in the FOSS drivers, with basic video acceleration and power management, and up to R500, have at least 'basic' (up to OpenGL 1.5 feature set, GLSL is still a work in progress) 3D acceleration. On R600/700, 3D is still very much experimental, and Evergreen support has barely started due to lack of documentation.

ATI does not support its proprietary fglrx driver on FreeBSD, it has been partly ported by a third party as of January 2007. This is in contrast to its main rival, NVIDIA, which has periodically released its proprietary driver for FreeBSD since November 2002 (64-bit beta driver available as of December 3, 2009). In the meantime, the release is similar to Linux.

The BSD license is probably more conducive to binary blob drivers than Linux/GPL, but my feeling is anyone running a BSD probably prefers the cleanliness of FOSS drivers anyway. Qaridarium has a point though, it is a much smaller audience than Linux to cater for.

Having said that, I wonder if anyone's got the FOSS radeon drivers working on Mac OSX?

To answer the rest of the replies, the complaint is the only support is FOSS drivers that is slow progressing and new hardware is not yet supported. So, you don't even have the open source option. If the community decides 'it's good enough' or 'it will take months/years' to achieve features A, B and C, you don't have another driver option (i.e. binary blob). The Nvidia equivalent is less than ideal but it's supported and should work to some degree... at least, you can use recent hardware with it.

Kano's point is also good as well... they're supporting Solaris... what about the excuse that the market share is super low or percentage of users is low? Where is AMD?

Only people who care about stability over cutting edge and a true free license that doesn't interfere with people who want to use certian items like dtrace and zfs or people who want to use grandcentral, llvm, clang, etc. No OS fits everyone. Like any other OS, BSD has it's advantages over the others in certain areas.